It's what? ten? no, eleven days since the attacks in Spain that left 14 people dead in Barcelona plus one woman in the nearby seaside town of Cambrils. For once there wasn't even the pretense that this was a "lone wolf" terrorist. It was an extremely large cell, organized by an imam called Abdelbaki es Satty, who prematurely self-detonated the night before when he and his conspirators accidentally blew up the house they'd filled with TATP.

I thought these novel aspects might hold the attention of the media. The imam/cell leader would seem to belie the view of the US National Security Advisor H R McMaster that Muslim terrorists who commit terror in the name of Islam do so out of "ignorance" of their faith - a view so fiercely held by Mr McMaster that it has resulted in the systematic cleansing from the White House of all those who dissent therefrom. And had Imam es Satty managed to get the TATP into the back of the van the death toll would have been many times higher.

But he didn't, so it wasn't. And fifteen dead on a glamorous and glittering European boulevard at the height of the tourist season now barely rates a #JeSuisWhatever hashtag, never mind an all-star pop concert with an audience of sorrowful, tilty-headed locals promising that no matter how often you blow us up we won't change - by, say, adopting a less tilty-headed and sorrowful expression. The imam's plan - to destroy the spectacular landmark church of the Sagrada Família - is oddly similar to the plot of Brad Thor's new thriller, Use of Force, where the equivalent Spanish target is the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia. Indeed, the imam's van driver has the same name as Mr Thor's key plotter: Younes. But what's thrilling in a thriller in now just the humdrum background music of real life in the new Europe.

So Barcelona came and went before I had a chance to write about it. So did Finland. You don't remember that one? No imams, no TATP. Just a lone stabber going full Allahu Akbar in a shopping mall in Turku. Two women dead, eight injured. As it happens, I was in Turku last year, driving up the west coast of Finland all the way to Kemi, a somewhat unprepossessing burg at the top of the Bay of Bothnia, where I'd had an extensive conversation, in the pedestrian shopping arcade, with an elderly "refugee" in a dingy dishdash. And I'd intended to write something about how absurd it was that clothing designed for the deserts of Araby was now a not unfamiliar sight in southern Lapland, in a town that's more or less the last stop before Santa's Grotto.

But ten stabbing victims in Finland barely makes the papers at all: Foot-of-page-27 "News in Brief" stuff. Just the umpteenth confused fellow acting out of "ignorance" of his religion. If only H R McMaster had become a bigshot ayatollah and opened a seminary in Qom or Cairo, all this "ignorance" could have been avoided.

There was more "ignorance" afoot in Europe last night. On the boulevard Émile Jacqmain in the heart of Brussels a Somali was shot dead after yelling "Allahu Akbar" and taking his machete to a bunch of soldiers, and Buckingham Palace was reported to be in "lockdown" after another guy with another machete and another cry of "Allahu Akbar" took on another security detail. As A A Milne put it:

They're stabbing the guard at Buckingham Palace

Christopher Mahmoud went down to kill Alice...

Lest you detect a pattern of behavior here, the Palace perp is reported to be "a 26-year-old man from Luton". The Brussels stabber is not from Luton. So no general conclusions can be drawn: It's not like Charlottesville, where one Caucasian in an automobile is an indictment of the entirety of American history necessitating the demolition of Stone Mountain and Mount Rushmore.

The Queen is older than almost all those around her, certainly older than her guards and the 26-year-old Lutonians lunging at them with machetes. And she must occasionally reflect that not so long ago one didn't hear words like "machete" and "lockdown" in connection with Buckingham Palace: "baldachin", "porte-cochère" certainly; but not "lockdown". Yet, if such thoughts should rise unbidden in one's mind, it is prudent to suppress them. Consider the cautionary tale of Sarah Champion, Member of Parliament for Rotherham and spokesperson for "Women and Equalities" in Jeremy Corbyn's shadow cabinet. Ms Champion penned a column for The Sun earlier this month:

Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls.

There. I said it. Does that make me a racist? Or am I just prepared to call out this horrifying problem for what it is?

Whether or not it makes her a racist, it makes her ineligible to be "Shadow Secretary of State for Women and Equalities" in Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition. Jeremy Corbyn fired Ms Champion. If you wish to prosper on Mr Corbyn's front bench, be less like Sarah Champion and more like her fellow northern MP Naz Shah. In the wake of Ms

Champion's sacking, Ms Shah failed to spot that the following Tweet was intended satirically, and so clicked "Like" and reTweeted it:

Those abused girls in Rotherham and elsewhere just need to shut their mouths. For the good of diversity.

Poor Ms Shah. As the late Ayatollah Khomeini sternly instructed, "There are no jokes in Islam." Why should she be expected to recognize the mordant wit for which the English were once famed?

I had thought the floodwaters of Texas had at least momentarily submerged the left's war on history. But I see a Hillary Clinton staffer called Logan Anderson has been triggered by a white man with a Confederate flag on his boat rescuing black people in Houston....

Totalitarianism is a young man's game. The callow revolutionaries like to crow that their enemies are all "old white men" who'll be dead soon, after which youthful idealism will inherit the earth. And it's true that the surviving German Nazis are all getting a bit long in the tooth. But they were young once, and bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. And to be young was very heaven: in the early Thirties the Nazis were the smooth-visaged lads gleefully torching books in the streets. They were the future, and these elderly monarchists and middle-aged democrats, queasy about the torching of the non-ideologically-compliant past, would all be dead soon enough. As the blond Aryan boy sings in Bob Fosse's film of Cabaret:

Oh fatherland, fatherland, show us the sign

Your children have waited to see

The morning will come when the world is mine

Tomorrow Belongs to Me!

I am reminded that the average age of the ISIS barbarian is somewhere in the teens, and the Antifa Fascists rioting and beating its "enemies" to a pulp are mere youths.

And let's not forget this memorable quote:

"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns,” Rhodes sneered in a New York Times profile. “That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

Tuesday, August 29, 2017

BERKELEY, CA—Vowing to derail whichever event it is by any means necessary, local Antifa organizers announced plans Monday to disrupt an upcoming neo-Nazi rally or whatever else is going on that day. “We will stop at nothing to prevent these vile fucking neo-Nazi hatemongers from gathering, or, if not them, someone else,” said Sarah Jackson, 26, adding that the only way to end the spread of fascism is to physically confront Nazis, peaceful right-wing protesters, or just random people going about their daily lives. “We need to tell these Hitler-loving fucks or whoever else is standing there, ‘Get out of our city!’ Remember, we’re talking about white supremacist terrorists, people running errands on their lunch breaks, or a group of tourists, so if we have to throw a punch or two, then so fucking be it.” At press time, black-clad Antifa demonstrators screaming “Fascists, go home!” had swarmed a Scandinavian street festival.

These people cannot be mocked enough and it's literally impossible to parody them.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has long listed Christian organizations and activists for reform in the Muslim world along with racists like the Ku Klux Klan. The SPLC's "hate group" lists and "hate map" have unfairly targeted mainstream conservatives, and even some liberals. Now, some of the groups slandered by this organization have begun to fight back — and it's not just Christian groups like D. James Kennedy Ministries and Liberty Counsel.

"The SPLC, who made their money suing the KKK, were set up to defend people like me, but now they've become the monster that they claimed they wanted to defeat," Maajid Nawaz, a British politician and founder of the anti-Islamist organization the Quilliam foundation, declared in a video announcing his lawsuit against the SPLC for defamation.

"They have named me, alongside Ayaan Hirsi Ali, on a list of 'Anti-Muslim Extremists,'" Nawaz said. "I am suing the SPLC for defamation and I need your help to win." ....

But the SPLC does not deserve this widespread trust, support, and publicity. The organization is a "cash-collecting machine" that spreads libels against religious organizations and has been connected to two domestic terror attacks.

Saturday, August 26, 2017

Heh!

Many in the national media are worried that President Trump's continued broadsides against the press will inspire violence against reporters, even as vocal opponents of the White House on the Left have encouraged assault or directly attacked some journalists.

Named among those quoted who fear violence from Trump supporters are NY Times Jim Rutenberg, Jim VandeHei, founder of the news website Axios, Jeffrey Toobin, a writer for the New Yorker and a CNN commentator, and New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff.

To date, more than two years after he launched his campaign and seven months after his inauguration, there is no clear evidence linking Trump's rhetoric to any violence against reporters.

But a Bernie Sanders supporter and ardent Democrat attacked a group of Republican congressmen, nearly killing one. This attempt at real political assassination has disappeared from the press coverage as if it never happened.

Reporters have much more to fear from Leftist rioters like the Antifa gangs. Yet they never voice those real concerns. They would not dare; they would be crucified by their peers.

There has been some violence against reporters. In March, people who work for a local California news agency said they were assaulted at a Trump rally by his supporters, according to the Los Angeles Times. But the report said that among the four people arrested at the incident, all were counter-protesters, and made no mention of them being inspired by Trump.

..

After the riot in Charlottesville, nearly two weeks ago, some reporters on the scene said on social media that they had been attacked by people counter protesting the white supremacy rally.

Among those in the media who said they had been assaulted were Taylor Lorenz of The Hill, who posted a video on Facebook that cuts off after she is heard screaming and a man's voice yells at her to "Stop fucking recording." She claimed she had been punched in the face and that her phone was kicked away.

The photographer for a CBS affiliate in Richmond was also allegedly attacked by the Left and had to get stitches while recording one of the counter protests, according to the station.

It's always the same with the Left: blame the Republicans for things that your side does regularly.

The fact is that the violence is mainly on the Left.

The kind of people that go to Trump rallies, ordinary people, would no more think of attacking a reporter than killing their children. They may despise reporters for their bias and open bigotry. They know that the press hates normal people and sees Trump supporters are racist Nazis. They accept that and go on. They just ignore reporters. But the Left has to have the press working for them. It's the way they appear to be the majority when they are a minority. The press is their megaphone, their crazy fun-house mirror to appear to be ten feet tall. And if by mistake a reporters actually records their violence and shows the reality, they attack the reporter.

I'm dying to hear about the "3-D chess" Trump is playing with his announcement on Monday that he's breaking his promise on Afghanistan and throwing more forces into that utterly pointless war. Will he be sending the transgender troops?

But then the Emperor God gave a magnificent speech in Arizona Tuesday night. Curiously, when he talks to voters -- as opposed to his Cabinet and White House staff -- there's very little about sending more U.S. troops to die in the human meat-grinder of Afghanistan.

Trump got thunderous applause from his 30,000-person focus group for the wall, stepped-up deportations and Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio -- recently convicted of contempt for "racially profiling" Hispanics. But you could hear a pin drop when he mentioned Afghanistan, Nikki Haley and Gen. John Kelly. (At least he had the good sense not to bring up Goldman Sachs' Gary Cohn again.) ...

It may not seem like it at first, but another one of those head-scratching cliches is: "Peace through strength." During the campaign, this was a staple of knuckleheads like Jeb!, but I'm sorry to report that our hero used it on the Arizona crowd, referring to his decision to send more troops to die in Afghanistan for no earthly purpose. The Swamp is sticky....

During the Cold War, America was facing an aggressively imperialistic, nuclear-armed Soviet Union. By contrast, the main threat to Americans' safety today comes not from a country, but from millions of individual savages spread throughout the globe.

Americans aren't being slaughtered by invading Soviet troops, "Red Dawn"-style, but by Islamic terrorists on tourist visas flying commercial airplanes into our skyscrapers, and by first- and second-generation Muslim immigrants setting off bombs and shooting people at the Boston Marathon, American military bases, community centers and gay nightclubs.

Americans are raped, addicted and murdered not by the Red Army, but by millions of illegal aliens waltzing across our wide-open border.

Our freedoms are being taken away not by a foreign power, but by our own government -- in order to protect us from terrorists, international crime rings and Mexican drug cartels operating in our own country.

Defeating a non-country adversary may seem an impossible task, but the savages are perfectly containable. Today's enemy has no capacity to harm a hair on a single American's head -- as long as we don't let them come here.

1. Apparently Jim Acosta is now doing opinion commentary on events which did not happen, but which he psychically divines might happen in the future.

2. In fact, the media does push #FakeNews about hurricanes when there's a Republican President to attack. Pretty amazing that he doesn't know about all the #FakeNews about people eating babies and raping crocodiles at the SuperDome.

Interestingly, Paul Manafort was the subject of white-hot searing by the media, and yet -- get this -- he advised the very group that Hillary Bundler Tony Podesta, brother of Hillary campaign manager Jon Podesta, now confesses he himself represented.

I'm just it's all a coincidence that Al Qaeda and Hamas and ISIS have been telling their cultists to go on "stabbing intifadas" and stab the infidels wherever they find them and suddenly a whole bunch of infidels are being stabbed.

Bumbling police/politicos search for clues as far away from reality as possible.

What's the end game for these preening, posturing doofuses who call themselves Republicans, but who can't pass a CNN camera without slamming their party’s president? There is a lot of blue falconry going on in the GOP right now, and while it's pretty clear why, what's not so clear is what these fair weather frauds believe they're accomplishing.

We know why they do it. Some of them are truly shocked and upset by Trump's rough edges. He's not your grandfather’s Republican. He's more like your grandfather's buddy who got Pops drunk and took him to a brothel long before he ever met grandma. Trump’s rude and crude, and that rubs a lot of Republicans the wrong way. His cheerful vulgarity and vindictiveness, which many find his most attractive qualities, offends some people because they're decent people of moral character who just can’t go there. It rubs others the wrong way because they're hopeless wusses who would rather be loved by the WaPo than kick liberals in their Harry Reids.

Others undermine our party’s leader because Trump dropped a deuce in their profitable punch bowl. They used to have power, and now they’re on the sidelines, and it gnaws at them. For so long they had control of the Republican Party, and they could shamelessly lie to our faces at election time back home in the sticks, then return to Washington, D.C., take off their sensible shoes, slip on their Gucci loafers, and proceed to do the bidding of their donor masters. Ka-ching!

Oh yeah, we’ll repeal Obamacare. Oh yeah, we’ll defend the border. Oh yeah, we’ll defund the baby-butchering cartel. Oh yeah, blah blah blah blah blah. All lies, but they didn't care. They had their power and prestige and the promise of a fat paycheck down the road when they moved from Congress to K Street. Actual conservative ideology? Well, that was for the rubes. And we were the rubes. We in the base, who are suffering from the establishment’s incompetent mismanagement of the society it had been foolish to try to micromanage in the first place, tried to warn them. But the Fredocons wouldn't listen, because they're smart, not like everyone says, like dumb…

That warning was called ‘the Tea Party,” and the GOP establishment didn't like it either. Remember how all those activated Republican voters helped recapture Congress, yet most of the establishment types looked at them like they were something nasty that was smeared on their shoes? See, the base isn’t supposed to be activated. It's supposed to be obedient. It's supposed to turn out on election day to do volunteer work and write checks. It's not supposed to try to have input. That's for our betters, not for us.

But the thing is, now we're woke, and we’ve realized that our establishment sucks, and that we’re tired of being the suckees. They didn't listen to us when we gave them the Tea Party, so now we gave them Trump. And they're very, very upset with us. That's a key reason they want to undercut Trump. Some people are just always going to want to trash the guy getting the attention and wielding the influence they think rightfully belongs to them. That's true whether they are some donkey–looking senator from Arizona or Nebraska pimping a book about his agonizing moral struggles, or some tiresome op-ed scribbler serving as the domesticated house conservative on a failing liberal rag, or the invasion-happy beneficiary of his parents' success who finds he can't fill the cabins on his brochure’s cruises anymore.

But what's the end game? What are they thinking is going to happen? Do they think that one morning Trump is going to wake up and think “Gosh, all these people telling me I'm wrong and mean and crude and tweet too darn much must be right. I'll change, because I always take the advice of people who I've already broken and humiliated.”

Unlikely, because Trump doesn't respect you. And he doesn't respect you because he's already beaten you. He's not a gracious winner, but to be fair, you've hardly been gracious losers. Oh, how it must gall you to be so utterly defeated by someone you consider your moral and intellectual inferior.

So if you're not going to change Trump, what do you think you're going to do? Do you think you're going to somehow drive Trump out of office? Let’s run down that scenario. Now we have President Pence, and about 75% of your party’s base infuriated at your backstabbing betrayal. That seems disastrous even if you buy the idea that President Pence would somehow preside over a return to something like business as usual. He might, at least until the next election. Then you're all toast. Let's just say that in addition to your treachery, your past track record of total failure to achieve the conservative goals you promised won’t particularly inspire Trump supporters to lend you their support.

Or maybe you think our voters would just be so disgusted that they would let the Democrats grab a majority on Capitol Hill and the White House too. Maybe you figure you could live with that. Maybe you think you can wait out the base’s fury by crawling back into the comfortable gimp box of submissive GOP congressional opposition.

Except it won’t work that way. Through all this Tea Partying and Trumping, we normals got a taste for power, and we like it. We're not just going to just shrug our shoulders when the guy we picked gets deposed in a coup. We’re going to get mad. Really mad. And you're going to get primaried. Just ask Jeff Flake (Dork-AZ). Have you seen his approval numbers? There are strains of the herpes virus that poll higher.

No, there's no going back to the old days. This is the new normal, and there are new rules, rules you better learn to play by. The most important of these is, “Take your own voters’ side in a fight.” You should try it, because if you didn't like the Tea Party, and you hate Donald Trump, you are going to be really, really, really unhappy with what we normals will do next.

Remember, the media stopped reporting on crime almost altogether -- and carefully omitting racial attributes of minority perps where it was forced to report on it -- when minority activists objected, arguing -- plausibly -- that showing daily a parade of minority criminals would influence the public that minorities are criminals.

That's plausible. I'm not sure I can agree that the trade-off -- embargoing news -- is worth it, but the rational is plausible.

In which case I have to ask:

Why does the media make sure that all white perps involved in crimes, especially racial or political ones, are relentlessly reported on and their whiteness made central to the story?

Does the media not think the same rule applies, that is, constantly featuring criminals of a certain race will poison public opinion against that race?

Or do they merely approve of poisoning public opinion against the One True Evil Race?

Thursday, August 24, 2017

I notice that the left media and even Fox News talk about the "discussion" on statues, or opine on the "conversation" concerning public monuments.

This Newspeak is apparently supposed to con the plebes into thinking something civil or democratic is happening. All I've seen is politicians or other apparatchiks rushing to remove statues (fearing the wrath of the mob) or actual mobs tearing things down.

If this is discussion, or conversation, then rape must be a "social event," and sticking up the local convenience store a "financial transaction."

And book burning is for keeping warm. We live in a decadent age of totalitarian narcissism.

"In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is...in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to." ― Theodore Dalrymple

Wednesday, August 23, 2017

First, an issue is identified by somebody with some level of popularity, wealth, or political power. The issue can be anything, you understand. Perhaps the issue will be the cultural appropriation of taco Tuesday by white Americans. Or maybe it will be how men belching is a dog whistle for misogyny. The man, you see, is demonstrating his contempt for any females within earshot when he burps. Anything can be rationalized this way. Anything can be argued to be hateful or discriminatory.

Once it is identified and pushed in some small way by someone with reach, a few genuinely angry people will protest it. Understand that for anything in the world, someone can be found to hate it. You could make your issue the color blue and be assured that someone, somewhere, would be offended enough to protest its existence.

Now, once a few legitimate protests spring up about the thing, the media will give it 24/7 news coverage. Perhaps there are only a few dozen people who hate the thing enough to come out on their own to protest it, but that doesn’t matter. Clever editing, camera angles, and constant coverage can multiply the perceived numbers and create the illusion of a much bigger movement. Note, too, that this can be used on political enemies as well as allies. When a few dozen Klansmen get together somewhere, the editors can make it appear like the Nuremberg rally.

Wednesday, August 09, 2017

Plenty have noted that by firing James Damore over a memo in which he criticized Google as “an ideological echo chamber,” the company just proved him right.

In fact, plenty of people who seem to think they’re defending Google are doing just the opposite. NPR, for example, talked to a former Google software engineer who claimed that some women stayed home from work Monday because they were so upset over the memo.

A former Google software engineer says some women at the company skipped work today, upset by the leaked memo. http://n.pr/2hF4y0G

Job growth was decent in July — the fourth straight month of just-OK results on that front, which probably led to high fives at the White House.

But there’s something unusual in the numbers.

And when I tell you what it is, you’ll understand that voter dislike of Hillary Clinton and the Russian interference in the election had little to do with why Donald Trump became president.

The election turned on the amount of money voters had in their pockets.

The latest revised figures from the Commerce Department showed that take-home pay and disposable income in the US haven’t nearly kept up with the job growth figures — and the trend began well before Trump took office.

...

In addition to poor increases in disposable income, savers also can’t count on income from bank deposits. So that, too, is slowing spending.

Washington originally said that disposable income grew at 1.1 percent annually in the first three months of Trump’s presidency. Now it says growth was only 0.20 percent on an annual basis.

And disposable income in the second quarter, which just ended, looks like it grew at just 0.51 percent annually.

The bottom line? Go ahead and cheer the July job numbers if you want, but in no way do they square with disposable income figures.

Either the job figures or the disposable income numbers are wrong. Or — and this is what many people believe — all of the jobs being created are very poor-quality and poor-paying.

All those "Help Wanted" signs in store windows are for entry-level, low wage jobs like restaurant workers or shop clerks. High paying manufacturing jobs are still in the future.

Mike Kelly was the Erie, Pennsylvania, car dealer who challenged Democratic Congresswoman Kathy Dahlkemper in the Tea Party Year of 2010, and beat her by 10 points. His margins of victory were bigger in 2012 and 2014, and last year he ran unopposed.

Home from Washington this month, Congressman Kelly sees an America the media does not see.

From Fox Business News:

"Back home, people aren't mad at the president. They're mad at the Republican Party for not working with the president to try and get things done," said Rep. Mike Kelly (R., Pa.), who said he hears complaints while doing errands at Wal-Mart in a district that Mr. Trump handily won.

How Republican lawmakers respond to such frustration -- and whether they move past the health defeat or get swept back into that fight -- will determine whether the GOP-led Congress returns as a unified force. August is the longest recess of the year, and constituents can both energize and draw energy from lawmakers who appear at town halls and other meetings.

Many Republicans are worried that an inability to deliver major legislative accomplishments would result in significant GOP losses in midterm congressional elections. Although Republicans have a favorable map in 2018 that should bolster their chances of holding their Senate majority, GOP strategists see a greater risk of losing control of the House.

The story went on about polls and the like which show gloom and doom for Republicans hanging on to the House.

Certainly the Senate is unhelpful.

And what is Paul Ryan's incentive to stay on as speaker? He could make five to ten times as much money as a lobbyist. He's never going back to Wisconsin. He is a creature of the swamp. He has lived in Janesville only one year since turning 18, and that was to run for Congress the first time. College in Ohio followed by living in Washington.

Eric Cantor lost a primary to David Brat. Cantor was rewarded with a nice lobbying job.

'Tis their nature. Washington has become a magnet for men of weak will and poor character.

If you wonder how you can get fired by Google for questioning liberal bias ...

A software engineer’s 10-page screed against
Google’s diversity initiatives is going viral inside the company, being shared
on an internal meme network and Google+. The document’s existence was first
reported by Motherboard,
and Gizmodo has obtained it in full.

In the memo, which is the personal opinion of
a male Google employee and is titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber,” the
author argues that women are underrepresented in tech not because they face
bias and discrimination in the workplace, but because of inherent psychological
differences between men and women. “We need to stop assuming that gender gaps
imply sexism,” he writes, going on to argue that Google’s educational programs
for young women may be misguided.

The post comes as Google battles a wage discrimination
investigation by the US Department of Labor, which has found that Google
routinely pays women less than men in comparable roles.

Gizmodo has reached out to Google for comment
on the memo and how the company is addressing employee concerns regarding its
content. We will update this article if we hear back.

The text of the post is reproduced in full
below, with some minor formatting modifications. Two charts and several hyperlinks
are also omitted.

Tuesday, August 08, 2017

D'Souza: the Democratic Party, of Obama but also of Bernie [Sanders], of Elizabeth Warren is fascist in the classic meaning of the term, in the dictionary meaning of the term.

If you look up fascism, the economic part of it, it basically says state-run capitalism, state-directed capitalism, that’s the meaning of fascism,” D’Souza said at the Young America’s Foundation National Conservative Student Conference on Friday.

“We often accuse the left of being socialist but in reality these guys aren’t socialists, because what do socialist countries do? Socialist countries nationalize industries. The government takes over the energy industry, the government takes over the banks. Now, notice under Obamacare we still have private insurance companies, we still have private hospitals but the government is directing them. The government is fixing the price. The government is telling them what to do,” he added.

D’Souza said government “direction and control” expanded under President Obama in the health, energy and education sectors.

“That’s why Bernie and Hillary wanted free college. Their idea was the government now gets to direct even private colleges in telling them what to do. So my point is this is not socialism: if it was socialism the government would have taken over all this stuff. This is actually fascism, state-directed capitalism. That’s what fascism means and, in that respect, fascism is with us now,” he said.

The truth of it is nationalism is not a defining feature of fascism; that’s a lie and it can easily be shown to be a lie by simply looking at people around the world who

were or are nationalists. So, for example, I’m originally from India; Gandhi was a nationalist. Mandela was a nationalist in South Africa. The American founders were nationalists. Winston Churchill was a nationalist, so was de Gaulle in France,” he said. “All the anti-colonial leaders were nationalists. Now, obviously all these men were not fascists. So it’s simply if ultra-nationalism were to define fascism, then they would be so the notion that fascism is nationalism is clearly erroneous.”

What is it about a thoroughly discredited doctrine like Communism that just won’t die? My overall sense from the “Red Century” series is that enough years have passed since the fall of the Iron Curtain that Western intellectuals now feel they can get away with downplaying Communism’s crimes and failures and return to rapturous descriptions of its abstract ideals, without the need any longer to take a serious look at what those ideals really meant in practice.

The theory of Communism—the elevation of the collective over the individual and of government dictates above free, private decision-making—is the fundamental cause of all of its evils. But it’s also a moral theory with old roots, on that has established itself in many people’s minds as synonymous with morality itself. Of course everyone should put the collective “public good” over private interests—what could possibly go wrong? Well, we found out what could go wrong, over and over again. We have plenty of reasons to think that individual rights and private interests are actually essential to a free and prosperous society—not to mention that they might help keep us out of the gulag.

But if you can’t bring yourself to question whether the theory of socialism is synonymous with the very idea of morality and progress, you won’t be able to relinquish the socialist dream, even after it has been exposed as a nightmare.

This deep vein of denial has troubling consequences. One sign—still on a very small scale—is the reconstitution of “Young Communist Clubs,” something I haven’t seen much of since I was in college in 1989, the year reality pulled the rug out from under all of the earnest young socialists. This can only be happening again because today’s young people have been allowed to grow up ignorant of the nature of Communism, both in the past and in the present. And this is aided and abetted by publications at the top of the culture, like The New York Times, as they draw a gauzy curtain of nostalgia across the history of twentieth-century Communism.

One of those “Red Century” encomiums to Communist idealism sums up its case by recalling “Rosa Luxemburg’s revolutionary ultimatum: ‘socialism or barbarism.'” But the lesson of history—heck, the lesson of our own time—is that socialism is barbarism.

Thursday, August 03, 2017

The same is true, of course, in the US where organizations like NASA and NOAA have also been caught red-handed making adjustments to their own temperature data sets, none of these convincingly explained.

But this scandal is not as widely known as it should be, largely because it goes virtually unreported in the liberal-dominated mainstream media. This partly explains the huge discrepancy between the way liberals think about climate change and the way conservatives do. According to this survey, liberals in both the U.S and the UK are dramatically more worried about climate change than conservatives.

Sweden's government is in crisis after a government agency accidentally leaked the entire country's personal details database by offshoring its storage without adequate safeguards. Two ministers have been fired and the entire government may fall.

Swedish prime minister Stefan Löfven confirmed on Monday that private information concerning citizens of Sweden had been exposed to serious security risks after the government outsourced IT services for the Swedish Transport Agency (Transportstyrelsen) to IBM in 2015.

IBM, in turn, left an astounding amount of information exposed to a number of unauthorized users around the world — including the names, home addresses, and photos of every member of the police, secret military units, information from the witness-relocation program, information regarding the weight capacity of all roads and bridges, and details regarding the specifications of all government and military vehicles (and their drivers).

Apparently, the transport agency mistakenly emailed their entire database of sensitive information to marketers in plain text. And upon realizing their error, the agency decided to merely ask subscribers to delete the old message and later sent out an updated one.

Spectacular as it is, the Swedish disaster is just the latest in a seemingly unending series of similar catastrophes of which the OPM records loss , Snowden defection, State Dept secret cable loss, NSA toolkit theft are but a few well known examples. The casualties flash past like milestones in a blur. Britain's NHS lost 100,000 patient records the other day. Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif lost his job today due to "documents leaked from a Panama-based law firm" proving he was corrupt. In an age where the media use unnamed sources to launder leaks and section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is allegedly used for political surveillance no one's secrets are safe. We appear to have entered the age of digital nakedness and not even politicians are immune. Hillary was supposedly robbed of her election by Russian hackers who stole her secrets and broadcast them though some of the losses may actually have been due the DNC's own careless selection of fraudsters to run their IT operation.

When the Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State runs her own unsecured private server for all her messages, when the Obama Administration uses the NSA to spy on its political opponents, when the Democrats in Congress hire a criminal Pakistani family to run it's IT services, and the Edward Snowden data leaks that have rocked the entire US government, the idea that giving the government even more control is positively scary.

These people are NOT the "best and the brightest," and they are not to be trusted.

Hillary famously claimed she understood the implications of artificial intelligence and robotics but does she really? Did the Swedes really? It's entirely possible that, despite their show of outward confidence no one fully understands the changes we've unleashed, least of all politicians nurtured in bureaucracy. The death of privacy appears to be an externality of the information age just as pollution was the unintended consequence of the industrial revolution. Nobody knows how much it will cost and the elite doesn't know how to deal with it.

Though governments pretend to be in control the facts suggest otherwise. Part of the problem is the government's habit of power. They've had it for so long they think it is theirs by right. Bureaucrats want the public to remain unprotected by encryption, the better to keep the public safe, though probably the better to keep everyone under control. And they're not succeeding. ...

Wednesday, August 02, 2017

Letter to the Editor of the Virginian Pilot

Editor

The Virginian Pilot

150 W. Brambleton Avenue

Norfolk, VA 510

Trump’s critics don’t get
it. A recent letter writer characterized
Trump’s criticism of journalists, members of Congress and judges as
“authoritarian.” As if Trump is the
first President who had disagreed with his opponents.

As I recall, Harry Truman
famously promised to punch a reporter who wrote disparaging remarks about his
daughter. It was Barack Obama who stood
up in front for the entire Supreme Court and lambasted them for a ruling they
had made, and was called a liar by one of Justices. And it was Bill Clinton who sent his minions
out to smear Special Prosecutor Ken Starr after lying to the nation, the
Congress and his cabinet about his dalliance with an intern.

The letter writer talks about the
framers who designed “equal and independent branches of the federal government”
as if to imply that if they don’t all agree our rights and freedoms are in
danger. That is the exact opposite of
the truth. The only places where all
organs of government agree is in dictatorships or one-party states. In democratic Republics like ours there is
healthy disagreement over issues and solutions.
One of the reasons Trump was elected was because the governing classes
have failed the American people. Certain
segments of our culture – people Angelo Codevilla referred to as the Ruling
Class - became wealthy while the broad middle and working class lost their
jobs, a direct result of government policies, and their hope for a better
future.

Calling Trump “authoritarian” or
“Hitler” is a direct attack on the people who support him. It’s another way of calling them fascists or
Nazis. That’s how you get more Trump.

In other news John Hinderaker at Powerline writes that THE ADMINISTRATIVE STATE DECLARES INDEPENDENCE. One of Obama’s followers in the Department of Justice, Former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates, wrote an article that states that the DOJ must be independent of the President, a shockingly unconstitutional proposition.

“Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution places all of the executive power of the federal government in the President: “The executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” The Justice Department is an executive agency, and therefore reports to the President in every respect.”

We may not like the policies of the President. We may find them abhorrent. But no one ever suggested that the DOJ under Obama was not under his command, or that it was an independent agency unanswerable to elected officials.

Of course Democrats and other proto-Fascist only make this argument when the President is a Republican and the DOJ employees gave 97% of their political contributions to Hillary.

Quoting Hinderaker:

“Yates argues for a permanent bureaucracy in Washington that is impervious to the wishes of the voters, who may occasionally be so imprudent as to elect a Republican president. ….The administrative state is by far the greatest contemporary threat to the liberty of Americans. The appalling Sally Yates urges that the Constitution be left in the dust, and that unelected bureaucrats be elevated above the president whom they ostensibly serve. It is hard to imagine a theory more at odds with our Constitution or our political traditions.”